Choosing Leadership: A Workbook

By Linda Ginzel

• A must-have leadership workbook for anyone striving to succeed in business and develop more effective managerial practices
• Straightforward, hands-on approach to improving leadership skills
• Lecture-style writing and interactive workbook create a classroom in a book
• Educational resource perfect for course adoption
• Author is a professor at the prestigious University of Chicago Booth School of Business, whose elite MBA program is currently ranked first globally by the Economist
• Author is the recipient of the President’s Service Award, the nation’s highest honor for volunteer service directed at solving critical social problems, as well as the two-time recipient of the James S. Kemper Jr. Grant in Business Ethics
• Book will be supported with author lectures, appearances, and leadership seminars

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agate B2
• Release date: May 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781572848450

Linda Ginzel

Dr. Linda Ginzel is a clinical professor of managerial psychology at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and the founder of its customized executive education program. For three decades, she has developed and taught MBA and executive education courses in negotiation, leadership capital, managerial psychology, and more. She has also taught MBA and PhD students at Northwestern and Stanford, as well as designed customized educational programs for a number of Fortune 500 companies. Ginzel has received numerous teaching awards for excellence in MBA education, as well as the President’s Service Award for her work with the nonprofit Kids In Danger. 

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Leadership is a choice

This is a simple statement, and the premise of everything that follows: leadership is a choice. If you want to stop reading, you can stop now because you now know the gist of this book. You make a choice to lead.

However, leadership is your choice. You make choices that will change the future, create better outcomes, generate more meaning, and help shape your future self. On what basis do you make your choices? This book is in large part about answering that question, as part of working on your future self. The self is a work in progress. It doesn’t matter how old you are, or what your job is, or whether you have an official-sounding title. We all have hopes for our future self.

This workbook is your companion on your life-long journey to be wiser, younger.

Here’s a story from Ivan, one of my former students, who tells how his choices transformed him from a chubby boy who was too shy to ask for directions on the street to a person who was in charge of himself and ready to choose to lead other people.

One of my early leadership experiences happened when I came to study in the United States at the age of 17 from a small regional city in Russia. I had to start making my own choices, choosing my own behavior, and making my own living. I started to exercise regularly, lost weight, studied hard to get good marks, worked on a part-time job, and joined the Corps of Cadets.

I think leadership starts when you choose to take ownership and responsibility of your own actions. You can’t lead other people if you don’t know how to lead yourself. When I came to the US at 17, it was the first time that I truly had to take the lead of myself.

Throughout this book, you will read a variety of early leadership stories such as Ivan’s story. Taken together, these stories illustrate that each of us has many more opportunities, and more varieties of choice, than we recognize. We all tend to operate on default mode, based on behaviors that have become habits. If you are successful and capable, you probably have pretty good habits. If you were to never have picked up this book, you would probably do just fine in life by operating on your defaults. But you can create better habits by recognizing, changing, and improving those defaults. Let’s start with a few definitions. Throughout these pages, I often use the word champion, because this book is not intended exclusively for business executives. You might think I’m writing for people in the C-suite—and I hope this topic will interest them—but everyone can be a champion. If you make decisions that affect your own outcomes and the outcomes in your workplace, your family, and community, then you are a champion.

Another definition I want to clarify early on is leadership. When we use the word leadership, people get caught up in what they think it should mean and often get it mixed up with management. Harvard’s John Kotter has said that managers promote stability while leaders press for change. This implies that some people are managers and others are leaders. I see it differently: The same person both manages and leads.

When you are managing, you are in the present. You may be managing a budget, meeting expectations, checking inventory, or making sure you’ve got diapers in the house. Whatever it is you’re doing that’s for the present is management, and it’s very important. Most of the time, you’re managing.

Every once in the while, you make a choice to create a different future. This can be a small or a big choice, but either way, this is leadership. At this point, when you decide to change the present to create a different future, you are making the choice to lead. This is my definition of leadership: behavioral choices that we make in order to create a better future.

In doing so, you can be wiser, younger. You will never again be younger than you are today, but you can be wiser. Much of the work we do in this book will help you to become your wiser self sooner rather than later.

Here are a few more important things to consider: My watchword for champions is choice. It’s important to avoid getting caught up in labels when choosing whether to manage or lead. Managing is no less important than leading.

But don’t simply accept my definitions as they are presented. Using this workbook, you will form your own understandings, based on your personal experiences and unique perspectives. Definitions—and whether they are articulated, written down, and understood—affect our behavior. You may currently use a definition of leadership that involves a lot of myths, some of which may hold that you have to be tall, extroverted, attractive, male, and older in order to lead. You may think that leaders must have a title, a big office, or credentials from a fancy school. If you have bought into these myths, now is the time to rethink them. They limit your choices.

Instead of thinking about people who are leaders, think of the choices these people made to lead. As a champion, according to my use of the term, you have an opportunity in any given day to both manage and to lead. You make your choices on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

To lead and to manage Some years ago, Duke University’s Richard Larrick challenged me to talk about leadership as a behavior as opposed to a person or a position. I have found his challenge to be difficult and enlightening. Join me in following Rick’s lead, and in everyday conversation, do your best to stop using the nouns leader and manager. Instead, try using the verbs to lead and to manage.

This is why I call this book Choosing Leadership.

That choice can be difficult for many reasons. When we don’t understand something, perhaps due to anxiety or even fear, we look to others for answers. Many of us look to exemplars, such as bosses or teachers. But they don’t have all the answers. Leadership development requires asking some tough questions of yourself. This is difficult to do. So to truly grow, you have to be at a point in your life where you want to ask yourself these questions, and where you have the maturity to face the answers.

There are many books about leadership, so there is plenty to read on this topic. But at some point you have to do the work of self-development you need in order to lead. Though no one else can do this work for you, this workbook can serve as your guide.

Steve Jobs once said, Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. That’s a good quote to accompany you on this journey. This is your life. If you don’t know yourself well enough to make choices based on what you value, it’s easier to let other people make choices for you. For many of us this is quite sustainable, and even fulfilling. Until it’s not. One day you may look at yourself and ask, why am I doing this? What does it all mean? We don’t have to wait for such a crisis of identity to bring us to these questions.

"Experience is a dear teacher.

—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

There is an activity index on page 132 where you can keep track of your progress on your journey to be wiser, younger.

Each chapter offers a variety of activities intended to help you reflect on the data of your life. The activities require you to write things down, things that may have only been in your mind until this point. There is something magical about writing. Once you write something down, it becomes observable, something you can revisit, show to others, collect, edit, and expand upon. In other words, it becomes data. You can’t collect or write down everything, so you have to be selective about what you want to record. But writing is key. If you write something down, you might do nothing with it. But if you don’t write it down, it will likely disappear from your mind. And you won’t be able to use it for changing your behavior and improving your future outcomes. The activities presented in this workbook serve as vehicles for you to make your own understandings of life’s lessons concrete.

Verba volant, scripta manent is a Latin proverb. Literally translated, it means spoken words fly away, written words remain.

Why I wrote this book

Before getting started on yourself, you may want some background on me. So here’s a bit about how I ended up being dragged kicking and screaming into the study of leadership, and why I wrote this workbook.

I’m an experimental social psychologist, and every day I help executives put social psychology into practice. I am the last person on earth who thought I’d be writing a book on leadership. My first love was management. In 1986, I was a doctoral student at Princeton University. I took a leave of absence and went to work for Mutual of New York as a corporate training consultant in designing educational programs, and that’s where I discovered my interest in management.

My first faculty job was at Stanford Graduate School of Business. I was the first Princeton PhD in psychology to take a job in a business school, and back in 1989, that was considered heretical. I eventually taught management to MBA students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and found I was able to help students put knowledge of social psychology to use on a daily basis. Teaching for me is about more than pouring information into students’ heads; it is about conveying what they are capable of doing.

In 2005, a friend and Booth colleague, Howard Haas, asked me to teach his long-standing leadership course. In his professional career, he had worked his way up from sales manager to CEO of Sealy, the mattress company, then had spent 20 years reinventing himself as a teaching CEO. I remember him saying, Linda I’m going to retire at some point, and I’d like you take over my leadership class. I proposed we co-teach his course, so that I could learn from him but also contribute my own ideas. Over time, I developed an appreciation for how difficult it is to teach and learn leadership. There is no consensus as to what leadership is. And it isn’t like social psychology or any other academic field where training in the discipline is deep and narrow. Leadership is broad because it is multidisciplinary. There is no leadership canon. Because of this, there is no explicit body of literature that you can read knowing that when you are finished studying you will be recognized as an expert in the field.

Leadership is also a multi-billion-dollar industry where people will sell you anything you are willing to buy. (If